102. From Crisis to Opportunity: Redefining the Midlife Experience for High-Performing Women

In today's episode of the School of Midlife podcast, we challenge the conventional notion of a "midlife crisis." Host Laurie Reynoldson dives deep into why the term "midlife crisis" is outdated and doesn’t serve the high-performing women navigating midlife today. Rather than viewing midlife as a crisis, this episode reframes it as an incredible opportunity, a reset, and a turning point.

We discuss:

• The origins of the term "midlife crisis" and how it was initially framed around men’s career and mortality concerns.
• The different emotional experiences men and women face during midlife, including identity shifts, caregiving roles, and societal pressures related to aging.
• Why we should stop using the term "crisis" and start viewing midlife as an opportunity for reinvention.
• How societal expectations, especially for women, have historically contributed to feelings of dissatisfaction or anxiety, and how we can take control of our own narratives in midlife.
• Key questions to ask yourself as you enter this new chapter, including how you define success and what your best life truly looks like.

This episode encourages listeners to embrace midlife as a time for growth, change, and intentional decision-making, rather than a time of crisis. Let’s dive into the idea that midlife is not a period of difficulty but an opportunity for self-discovery, empowerment, and redefining our future.

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Transcript

0:01

In this week's episode of the School of Midlife podcast, I'm talking all about why there is no such thing as a midlife crisis. And I'm giving you some different language to use to talk about your midlife experience that will completely change the way you live through your midlife years So let's get started. Welcome to the School of Midlife podcast. I'm your host, Laurie Reynoldson. This is the podcast for the midlife woman who starting to ask herself big life questions. Like, what do I want? Is it too late for me? And what's my legacy beyond my family and my work. Each week we're answering these questions and more. At the School of Midlife, we're learning all of the life lessons they didn't teach us in school and we're figuring out finally what it is we want to be when we grow up. Let's make midlife your best life. Hey friends, it's Laurie. Welcome back to another episode of the School of Midlife podcast. I am thrilled to have you here today. In today's episode we're going to talk about midlife crisis. I've been posting a lot on social media and I've just been thinking a lot about this whole idea of a midlife crisis and if you've been around me much at all, you know that I don't believe in the idea of a midlife crisis, and I'm going to spend some time in today's episode walking you through explaining why I feel that that is true, that there is no such thing as a midlife crisis, that it's a bunch of BS. I guess I should start by saying, in In response to a number of the posts that I've been doing lately on this very topic, I've had women say, Oh, but you just don't know what I'm going through. I'm 100 percent going through a midlife crisis. And I would say, if you're someone who finds herself in that position, Two things. Number one, if you're going to fight for your limitations, if you're going to fight for your limitations, if you're going to fight for your limiting beliefs in this case that you are having a midlife crisis, then you get to keep your midlife crisis. Because anything that we fight for, any limitations that we want to fight for, you get to keep them. So, if you're the type of person who just has a whole list of reasons why this is what's happening to you, then congratulations, you get to keep it. If, and, and, and I will, I'll, I'll go one, So if you are someone who feels like you're having a midlife crisis and you're looking for all sorts of bits of information or proof that what you are thinking is true, then you're going to find an infinite number of ways to back up your case, whatever you're trying to prove. I, I'm hopeful, after listening to this episode, that you will agree that there is no such thing as a midlife crisis, that midlife is more of an opportunity. And hopefully if you are someone who finds herself feeling like you might be in that position of a midlife crisis then you can look at it a slightly different way and hopefully find your way out of the position that you seem to find yourself in. So I want to start by just level setting here and giving a little bit of information about this whole idea of midlife crisis. The term actually was first coined by. A Canadian psychoanalyst named Elliot Jacques in 1965, so not even that long ago, even though 1965 feels like it was like 30 years ago, it was actually 60 years ago, but, so he, he was writing this paper where he discussed What he called a crisis of the middle life, because what he was seeing in men between 35 and 40 is that men were experiencing this deep sense of dissatisfaction or anxiety about their life in particular context to the accomplishments that they had made in their life up until then, and during that time. So when men were in that 35 to 45 period, and remember this is in 1965, so men weren't living as long, um, at that time, but because they were having this kind of dissatisfaction of where they were in their life and in particular their professional life at that time, he noticed that they were starting to reevaluate their life goals and this coincided with questions about mortality and success and who they were as a person and as a father, not only in their family, but in their community. So, I mean, it's very, very consistent with a lot of the same questions and issues that we continue to grapple with as a society. As humans, high performing humans, we still are having those questions, right? Am I enough? Have I done enough? What have I accomplished? Why don't I feel so happy about my life? Why, why is this, like, this deep sense of dissatisfaction or anxiety? Why, why am I experiencing that? And again, it, it originally applied to men. And then in, we'll, we'll call it kind of the late 20th century. In the 80s, more in the 90s. Psychologists then started looking at how a woman's midlife experience, we'll call it an experience and not a crisis, but how women were experiencing this midlife angst differently than men. So women, had similar feelings of dissatisfaction, but instead of framing them relative to career and the professional accomplishments, they were more often framed around identity shifts, particularly as it related to transitioning from caregiving roles of say, raising your children into taking care of your aging parents the physical changes related to menopause, and then because women were going back into the workforce in the 80s and 90s, some of them were navigating some career changes. But again, Most of what women were experiencing were related to identity shifts. Who am I now that I'm midlife? And this was particularly true given the societal expectations and the values that we place on youth and appearance and traditional gender roles. And, I mean, obviously I don't have to tell you that our society places a I mean, I mean, all we have to do is look at television shows and movies and, and even protagonists and books and see that. The younger, prettier, skinnier, the young woman is, by and large, given much more time and attention than women in a certain age, right? I mean, once, once we get past our 20s and 30s, then in many cases, and this is changing, but In the past, in many cases, once we aged into our 40s and 50s and beyond, it was almost like we were washed up, that we were, we were not good for anything. Um, I, I would say we, it was changing, although I'm thinking back to a couple of comments made like during the election season, in particular, J. D. Vance's, comment that, and this is not trying to get into politics at all, but this is something that he said, that, that midlife women and grandmothers in particular, their whole role should be to focus on helping raise their grandchildren. Which, agree or disagree, I, I do not agree with that. It just seems to be another way in which in our society we try and keep women in certain societal roles and expectations and if you've been around here for a while then you know that I, I don't subscribe to those roles or those societal identities. Psychologists have also found that there seem to be, along with this, the shift in priorities in midlife, the emotional and the psychological experiences of men and women in midlife, they're a little different. So the focus of midlife, let's call it angst, let's dispose of the word crisis, but men in midlife, most of their feelings of an ease or angst, They're associated with career achievement and their question of have I done enough? Have I achieved enough? Where am I? In relation to other men in my career of my age, how am I comparing to what they have done? Men also experience the whole. How can I reclaim my lost youth, right? So that's why we see them having affairs with younger women, why they buy the sports car, why they start dyeing their hair or they take testosterone, they, they hit the gym, but how, how can they How can they appear younger? How can they reclaim, almost like their glory days? How can they get back to who they were in high school and what they look like in college? And so this whole idea that they're young and virile and They're a catch, right? So, so men, that's the focus of what they go through in midlife. And women, on the other hand, they're more likely to focus again on their identity, particularly because they're transitioning through these roles related to caregiving and menopause and, and, and career changes as well. But also they tend to experience It's more emotional distress tied to empty nest syndrome, when the kids are grown and flown, changes in their physicality brought on by menopause, and then of course the societal pressures regarding their age. And we, we talked briefly about movies and books and. How women just get aged out earlier. Men seem to and this is based on studies, but they seem to experience a It's a more intense, outwardly dramatic crisis, and because we can see their impulsive behavior, we can see them stepping out with their young secretary, we can see them buying the new sports car, we can see them dying their hair, and that contrasts with Women who internalize it way more when they start questioning their role in society, when they start considering their personal goals, when they, they deal with anxiety about aging. About who they want to be, about have they done enough, about are they running out of time, about what is their legacy beyond their family and their career. So whereas men, you can really see it from the outside, women it's more of an internal feeling and experience. So with that background. I want to talk about why I don't think there is any such thing as a midlife crisis and actually there is some research, fairly recently, say in the last 20 30 years, that Some psychologists and researchers have actually challenged the idea of this midlife crisis, saying it's either an oversimplification of what is going on in midlife, to other people agreeing that it's, it's a myth. And instead of midlife being marked by turmoil, As suggested by the term crisis, it's really should be viewed more as a period of personal growth, emotional regulation, really aging into and stepping into the person who You, you have always wanted to, to be, to become, I of course agree with those psychologists and researchers who, who think that it's really a myth, that it's, it's not a thing at all. It's more of an opportunity and we're going to talk about that a little bit more as we get into this episode. Okay. So Why don't I think that the term crisis is what we should be calling what's going on in midlife? Let's start with the definition. By definition, a crisis is a period of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger. I don't know about you, but turning 40, turning 50, that was not difficult, troublesome, or dangerous. Aging is a privilege, right? I mean, it's so much better than the alternative. I think we should all be able to agree that Aging into our 40s and 50s, 60s and beyond, that might feel like, Oh, you know, it might give us a little pause and think, Oh my God, what have I done with my life? What am I going to do with my life? But it's not a period of intense difficulty, trouble or danger. It's just not. The fact that you have another birthday to celebrate, the fact that you are moving into a new period of your life. That is not a crisis. That is not difficult. It's not troublesome. It's not dangerous. It simply is a new period of time that you're aging into. It's not a crisis. I think a couple of ways that we could talk about it differently would be to talk about the midlife opportunity. Opportunity is defined as a set of circumstances that make it possible to do something. So many of us as we age into midlife, we have this incredible opportunity to do something more or different with our life. It's more of an opportunity than a crisis. It's more of a turning point than a crisis. A turning point is defined as a, a point. Whether. I think we can all agree that there is some sort of a turning point that all of us experience in midlife, whether that is trying to figure out who we are once the kids leave, whether that's trying to determine what do we do next after we've reached the pinnacle of our career, whether that is a focus on, how do I want to live the second half of my life that is either the same or different than what I did before? But we've got this opportunity, we've got this incredible turning point where important change can occur. We could also talk about it as a sweet spot. Midlife being this optimum point or combination of factors or qualities. Related to that is the idea of an inflection point and that is a time of significant change in a situation or a turning point. So we already talked about turning point but again it's this idea that It's a period of time where things are changing and if we are paying attention to the midlife lessons that we should all be learning, that significant change can be very intentional. Instead of prior changes in our life which we have just allowed to happen to us. Or changes that we have made in our life because we felt like we should do them that they were expected of us that we were just kind of following the adulting success playbook in exactly the way that we were supposed to go to school, get a job, get married, have a family, buy a house, all of those things. And midlife is a time when a lot of us step back and say, well, that success checklist, the adulting playbook that I was given of all the things I should be doing, that, that's not working for me anymore. What do I want to do different? In midlife and beyond. And so that's when we see this idea of an inflection point, a turning point, a period of time of significant change. And finally another way we could think about this is a reset. To reset means to set again differently. So if we are trying to do something different in our life, in the second half of our life, then we should look at midlife more as a reset and not a crisis. with those definitions in mind, hopefully I have convinced you that Midlife is not a crisis at all. It's, it's more of an opportunity. It's a reset, a turning point. However you want to define it. But it's, it's much more of a gift than this almost scarlet letter branding that, oh, I'm in midlife and you know, life as I've known it is just, it's all downhill from here. And I 100 percent do not subscribe to that. In fact, in my opinion the term midlife crisis it's society speak, and when I say society speak, I mean white man society speak for a point in a woman's life where she starts choosing herself first and foremost in her life. When she starts making decisions that put herself first, that, that make her the lead character in her own story. And you might be out there thinking, well, of course, we're the lead character in our own lives, but not every woman lives that way. What I mean by that is for many high performing women, we feel like we have to not only achieve in the workplace, but then we also have to come home and take care of absolutely everything. At home, we've got to be the best mom, we've got to be the best wife, we've got to make sure that the house is always clean, the bills are paid, like all of the traditional female caretaking roles in the home. We have those, we still claim those, but in addition to that, we still have to go out and make the money to help pay for the lifestyle that our families have become accustomed to. And for many women, they want to be able to work outside of the home. Certainly, they understand the privilege and the opportunity of staying home full time, taking care of kids, raising them up, that, that is very important to work, but for many women, it's not enough, and in our society, a lot of times, we tend to judge women Hell, I mean, let's just call a spade a spade. We judge women whether they stay home and take care of their kids full time, or we judge them whether they go to work and leave their kids either in school or if they're not old enough to be in school yet, we leave them with a nanny or a caregiver or we take them to daycare. So we're judging women regardless of the decisions that they make. Which means, to me, you better figure out what it is you want to do and stop worrying about what anybody else thinks about you because they're gonna judge you anyway. So, isn't it more important, and isn't it in fact most important, that You take control of what it is you want to do in your life and just assume that the naysayers, the judgers, the people who have an opinion about you that is somehow different than how they would do it, they're going to do that anyway. So we might as well do the things that feel right to us, that feel important to us. circling back. I think this whole idea of a midlife crisis, particularly as it relates to women, it's when women started inconveniencing the men in our lives. It was different in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s, when women were staying at home and taking care of the home and then the husband would come home from work and it was all, Hey, honey, I'm home. I'm thinking, Hey, Especially of, like, the Brady Bunch. I was a huge Brady Bunch fan. Did you see that several years ago on HGTV, they did a whole, story on redoing the house that the Brady Bunch was filmed in? I just, I always wanted to live in that house, and I loved the idea of three boys and three girls, and then they had that cool Jack and Jill bathroom between their bedrooms, and I just thought that the Bradys were so cool. I loved everything about them. But for the most part, Carol stayed home during the day. And Mike, Brady, comes home as, you know, from his, his architecture practice. Also had a very cool office in his own home, at the base of those really cool stairs in that huge living room. You know what I'm talking about, right? But he would come home essentially and be like, Carol, I'm home for the day. And, you know, she would give him a hug and a kiss and ask him all about his day and make sure that Alice was working on dinner so that they could have dinner. And it's different, that whole idea is different than how things are in reality right now, which is most women are also working outside of the home, which means when they get home, they're just as tired, they've had as just as long a day, they've been dealing with the same sort of mental issues and highly Taxing emotional issues at work, but unlike men, when women come home, men are like, Hey, I'm home, feed me, make me happy. Women are like, and now I'm home and now I get to start the second half of my day, which is taking care of my family. And for me, the reason that I think this term of midlife crisis, particularly as it pertains to women, has gained so much traction is in our relationships, by and large, the women have still carried the bulk of the caregiving, the hometending responsibilities, in addition to going to work. But now they're finally saying, This traditional separation of work and home, and our responsibilities at work and home. That's no longer working for me. And when she does that, the man in the relationship, the husband, the spouse, all of a sudden is like, Well, what in the hell is going on? I don't feel like I'm the most important person in your life anymore. I don't feel like I'm the center of attention. I don't feel like you are paying as much. Attention to me as you did before. Okay, I feel like you're going crazy. I feel like you're not acting like yourself. What is going on? You must be having a midlife crisis. It's just easier for the men in particular to say, you're not acting like yourself. Something's wrong. I feel like you're, you're going crazy. You must be having a midlife crisis. It's easier for them to say that than to look inside and do some deep internal introspection and think, huh, I wonder why she's feeling like that. I wonder what about our home situation or our relationship or the rules that we have come to live by in our relationship, why aren't those working for her anymore? And it's been a very convenient excuse. High performing women are. Historically, bad at setting and holding healthy boundaries because we want to make sure that everyone around us is taken care of. We want to make sure that everything around us is taken care of. And we are often times quick to step in to address issues, problems, struggles of other people. Take those away, carry those on our back so that they don't have to. We want to make everything as tidy and convenient for the people around us as we can, and we do, and we have done that for years. And so what happens in midlife is when we, we get to midlife and we think, you know what, this is no longer working for me. I'm exhausted. The roles I have played, I'm confused about who I am because the kids have left the house. My parents need my help. My spouse still wants my full attention. And I don't even feel like I know myself anymore. To address that, then we start setting some boundaries. And we start holding them. But because those boundaries have never been a part of our relationship up until this point, then all of a sudden the people around us, they feel like they're getting pushback. They feel like we've changed. They feel like that we're not acting like ourselves. And instead of addressing the issues in the relationship, the problems with communication, the struggles that women are having on an emotional level, instead of doing that, then we just say, as a society, she's having a midlife crisis. But I want to flip that, and I want to give you permission to step Into this idea that midlife is an opportunity, that it's a beautiful reset if you take it, that it's a turning point. If you want it. If you get to midlife and you start feeling angsty, you, you start feeling like, wow, I've worked my ass off to get to this point. I felt like once I got to midlife, everything would feel wonderful and great and I'd finally know what I wanted to do with the second half of my life. If, if you are at that point and you're experiencing any of that, then I would say you're exactly where you need to be. You are not having a midlife crisis. You are just at this Turning point in your life, where you can either continue to keep up the appearances that you have up until now, you can stay in the roles, keep the responsibilities in your relationships exactly how you have until now, you can hang on to those identities of how you have until now, you can hang on to those identities of caretaker, chief problem solver, busiest person in your family, taking care of everyone else. You can, you can decide that you're going to continue to do those things in the same way that you have before. Or, you can see midlife as this opportunity, this turning point, this reset when important change happens. It's a turning point, right? It's when you get to decide what's important for you in the second half of your life. And that gets back to the three simple principles that I talk about all of the time. Which is, what is it you want in life? And when I say that, it's not what have you been conditioned to want, not what you were raised to want, not what your parents told you to want, not what society tells you to want, but what is it that you actually want? And how do you define success? Society tells us that success is, is related to our job title, how many zeros we get on our paycheck, how many material items that we accumulate over a lifetime. That could be your definition of success, but my guess is your definition of success is something more along the lines of doing what you want, when you want to do it, with whom you want to do it. It's really that simple. Having the freedom and clarity to. And I would say, you know what, no, I'm not going to continue to work to earn a certain title or earn a certain paycheck when that no longer aligns with my values and how I want to live my life. We talked about this a little bit on last week's episode. This whole idea of how do you know when enough is enough? How do you know when it's time to step back? Like you don't have to continue to strive because you already have everything that you need. That is absolutely tied with the idea of how do I define success? And how can I live my life as a success in the way that I think of success? And then the third principle is knowing what your best life looks like. Because you can't make midlife and beyond your best life if you don't know what it is. If you don't know what it is that you are trying to create in your life, it's like trying to put together a puzzle and having no idea what the done puzzle looks like. It's like trying to recreate your favorite dinner. Your favorite meal from that small restaurant in Florence, Italy. And you don't have a recipe. it's like visiting your best friend in her new city without having an address or a GPS to get you to her new house. how do we get from where we are today? How do we relate to living our best life and the life that we want to live if we don't know what that looks like? If we've never stepped back and taken the time to understand what's important to me? What do I value? And then creating a life that centers on those principles. What do I value? What do I want? How do I define success? So, when I think about midlife, I think about it as this incredible opportunity. What about you? Does it feel like an opportunity to you? Does it feel like a burden? Does it feel exciting? Does it feel draining? Do you, do you get anxious in an excited way? Or do you get anxious in a very disquieting, uncomfortable way? Because you get to choose that. If you're someone who doesn't really know what you want the second half of your life to look like. You, you know that you're having some feelings of angst. You know that you're not living With the feeling of fulfillment or satisfaction or maybe even happiness that you expected to even though you have everything you always thought you ever wanted Right the life that you're living right now you dreamt up the Ten year old twenty year old you thought if you could only get to this point you would be living the dream And a lot of us did that and we are living the dream and it's like well what the hell now this doesn't feel like I thought it would. If you're feeling any of that I am hosting a training this week to walk you through more in depth on the three simple principles that every midlife woman needs to know to walk you through. Skip the midlife crisis to create her best life and midlife and beyond. I will include a clickable link in the show notes and would love it if you were able to join us for that. I'm going to end with this idea that the words we use to describe ourselves and our lives are very important. So if we want to continue feeling like midlife is a crisis, Then that is exactly how we're going to approach it because we're telling our brain that that's what we think midlife Means to us that it's a crisis. It's this period of intense difficulty or trouble or danger. It's something that we don't want but if we flipped those words and we say, you know what midlife is an opportunity It's this sweet spot. It's a reset. It's a turning point Then, I promise you, your midlife experience is going to be much, much different and likely better than what you've been experiencing before, just by changing the terminology that you're using to describe midlife. I'd love to hear from you. What do you think? Do you agree that midlife is a crisis? Do you agree that midlife is something other than a crisis? Take a screenshot of this episode. Tag me on Instagram. Let me know your thoughts. Is it a midlife crisis? Is it something else? I'd love to hear what you think. Thanks so much for being here today. As always, I am so grateful that you come each week and spend a little bit of your time with me to talk about things that really matter to midlife women so that we can together live our best life in midlife and beyond. I'll see you right back here next week when the School of Midlife is back in session. Until then, take good care. Thank you so much for listening to the School of Midlife podcast. It means so much to have you here each week. If you enjoyed this episode, could you do me the biggest favor and help us spread the word to other midlife women? There are a couple of easy ways for you to do that first. And most importantly, if you're not already following the show, would you please subscribe? That helps you because you'll never miss an episode. And it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. Second, if you'd be so kind to leave us a five-star rating, that would be absolutely incredible. And finally, I personally read each and every one of your reviews. So if you take a minute and say some nice things about the podcast, well, that's just good karma. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you right back here. Next week when the School of Midlife is back in session until then take good care.